


We'll Eat You Up, We Love You So

by JeanLuciferGohard



Category: Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Body Horror, Cannibalism, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Gen, it's the third and they eat people y'know, naberius tern's anime nightmare dreamscape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-07
Updated: 2020-02-07
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:00:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22605907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeanLuciferGohard/pseuds/JeanLuciferGohard
Summary: Naberius Tern dreams of teeth.In his dream, the Princess of Ida is there, and the Princess of Ida is also there, and one of them looks disappointed, and the other one just looks bored.Naberius Tern character study.
Relationships: Coronabeth Tridentarius & Ianthe Tridentarius, Naberius Tern & Coronabeth Tridentarius, Naberius Tern & Ianthe Tridentarius
Comments: 9
Kudos: 78





	We'll Eat You Up, We Love You So

I.

Naberius Tern dreams of teeth.

In his dream, the Princess of Ida is there, and the Princess of Ida is also there, and one of them looks disappointed, and the other one just looks bored. In Naberius Tern’s dream, their teeth are white and perfect, like a military graveyard, which is how he knows it’s a dream, because the Princess of Ida’s teeth are crooked, just a little, crowding her lower jaw like they’re jockeying to sink in first, and the Princess of Ida has a chip on one of her canines, like a flaw in a diamond, so small it can’t be seen, only felt.

The Princess of Ida is there, in his dream, and the Princess of Ida is also there, and so is his fencing instructor, whose eyes he remembers being the translucent glass-green of a mirror seen edge-on, but in the dream they  _ are  _ glass, and he can see right through them into the wet meat of his tutor’s head. They are very tall, taller he remembers them being, and they take his trident-knife from his hip, and they take his arm by the wrist, and peel his bicep from the bone like an oyster, and that’s not how it happened it all.

What really happened was that summer he turned fourteen, slim and golden, with a beautiful sulky mouth, which he knew about because the spring _before_ he turned fourteen, they made a painting of him, and everyone said that the painting had a beautiful, sulky mouth, that summer, his tutor took him aside to say:

“You know there are duties beyond this.”

And of course he did, just like everybody knew that necros bite, and anyway, what did it matter, since he was possibly the most beautiful person alive, except for maybe Princess Coronabeth, who _also_ had a painting done of her, more than one, (and nobody painted Ianthe unless it was with her sister) and it was meant to be a terribly solemn thing, carving the littlest sliver of flesh from the heel of his sword-hand, and offering it up to the Princess of Ida, who would take it, and eat it, and pass it on to her sister, all very _symbolic_ with hardly any blood at all.

So he did. And they did.

But they’d both had their teeth in him for years already anyway, because the Princess of Ida always was bloodthirsty, and that’s what everybody always gets wrong about her.

In Naberius Tern’s dream, his arm is red from shoulder to wrist, and his blood makes a noise like rain on glass when it hits the ground. In his dream, Naberius Tern looks like the surface of the moon, cratered with toothy gouges and wormy scars, which is how he knows it’s a dream, because they always fix him after, good as new, like it never happened.

“Oh, Babs,” the Princess of Ida says, scraping blood from her lower lip with the edge of her fingernail, “You need to take better care of yourself. You taste _awful_.”

And the Princess of Ida dips her fingertips into the weeping hole of his arm and says nothing at all.

II.

In his dream, at the same time he’s fourteen and bleeding, Naberius Tern is twenty-two, and the Cohort lieutenant they’ve saddled him with for the next six months for a nominal tour of duty is staring at him with undisguised horror while he says, offhandedly, that the Princess of Ida practically turned his thigh into _carpaccio_ , once, the last time she _really_ got going.

The lines open across his leg.

And she didn’t at the time, but in his dream, she smears salted egg yolk and mango into the muscle, stripes caramel and bitter lime across his exposed femur, and the sauce runs into the velvet cushions of the couch he is suddenly sitting on, and the Cohort lieutenant is weeping while Naberius cocks his head to the side, debating the merits of getting her in on it, too.

They’re always in _incredible_ shape, Cohort officers. An exceptionally well-marbled people, the Second.

Admittedly, tears don’t taste like much, and the stress tightens up the meat, but they might do for a reduction. A glaze of some kind, he muses, if they could catch them.

“You think I ought to? Get a bottle or something, before she stops.” he murmurs.

The Princess of Ida looks up from his leg, wrinkling her nose.

“Babs, you know I hate rosewater.”

“Lungs, then. Fried with fennel, you like fennel.”

The Princess of Ida hums, considering, while she kneads at his flayed leg, picking off a sliver, which she hands to the Princess of Ida, who chews thoughtfully.

“More salt, I think. And _I_ loathe fennel, Babs, honestly. I can’t _believe_ you’d forget.”

And at the same time he is fourteen and bleeding, and twenty-two and bleeding, Naberius Tern, in his dream, is holding the Princess of Ida, who is weeping furiously into his shoulder, and he strokes her hair and murmurs:

“Who’s treating you so awfully, doll? Tell me who it is, I’ll kill them.”

But his whisper comes out more than halfway to a sneer, and they both know who it is anyway, and that Naberius could no more kill them than the Princess of Ida can, and she nearly slaps him for it, and then, at the last second, buries her face back into his shoulder again, tears running into her beautiful, red mouth while she grinds her teeth against his clavicle.

It _clicks_ softly, the sound of a broken pearl necklace.

(That part really happened. He was nineteen.)

III.

In his dream, Naberius Tern is at a party.

He is twenty-four, and dancing with a man whose hands span his trim cavalier’s waist entirely, and who spent, while Naberius watched, the better part of six hours artfully cracking pomegranates in half between his palms, and scattering them around the table setting, bruising persimmon wedges and skewering twists of glistening tripe to accent the trussed lamb rib centerpiece.

It’s not lamb.

It’s not like anyone can tell the difference.

The other houses like to pretend otherwise, but you really can’t. Meat is meat. Enough sauce, you could make a Ninth nun look appetizing. At least it’s honest. Not like the other Houses _wouldn't_ strip a planet to the bone along with everyone on it if they got the chance. At least this way, the table setting is nicer.

Anyway, the man’s...husband? Wife? Spent the same six hours flensing artichokes and oysters, and glaring, and is still glaring, while Naberius nips his jaw before pulling away.

“Oh, _he_ seemed nice,” The Princess of Ida coos, laying her head on Naberius’s shoulder, “Who’s your friend, darling?”

Bitch. It’s not like she  _ cares _ , it’s only that the Princess never did let anyone play with her toys, even after she’d gotten bored of them. She doesn’t care, she only hates to think someone might have their filthy fingers on her plate.

He bristles.

He doesn’t; they’ve force-fed him a cavalier’s conduct, a cavalier’s duty since he was seven, twice a day, every day,  like you’d feed a calf for slaughter. There is so much cavalier in Naberius Tern the bile of it spills out of his mouth when he talks. There is so much cavalier in him it blew out his liver, a foie-gras of perfect sword forms and perfect loyalty , that the Princess of Ida once ate a torchon of it alongside pickled winter pear. He doesn’t bristle, he only winds his hand into the baby-fine hair at her temple and murmurs:

“You wouldn’t like him. Not rich enough for your blood.”

She laughs, champagne-frothy and pealing.

“You’re so _funny_ , Babs.”

The Princess of Ida hums, and adds:

“Not rich enough for yours, either.”

The dessert course comes, cream whipped thick with blood and chocolate, a _sanguinaccio_ that the man Naberius Tern will not get to sleep with serves in glassy sugar cups brushed with gold leaf, and in his dream, Naberius knows that the blood in it is his own.

Meat is Meat. A cavalier does not let his charge go hungry.

IV.

It wasn’t his leg, the last time the Princess of Ida _really_ got going, what happened, really, was that he was standing, hand to his sword, knife at the ready, as a cavalier should, and she wrenched him back by the hair and tore into the meat of his neck, right where it met the shoulder, and the blood-sweat running down her face ran into the wound, too, and that made it sting more than it _hurt_. 

It takes more force than you’d think to break the skin. The edges of the bites are always a little bruised, a little puffy, before they fix him.

The Princess of Ida likes soft spots. The Princess of Ida bites harder.

V.

In his dream, he is seven, and the Princesses of Ida wanted a puppy, not a cavalier, and certainly not a _boy_ , which he knows because the Princess of Ida keeps reminding him, looking up from whatever obscure, twinly game she’s been ignoring him in favor of to sneer with all the baby-faced disdain she can muster:

“You don’t mean _anything_. Go away, or I’ll make your skin walk off your meat, and I’ll keep it in a drawer, and then you’ll be like the Hollow Boy, and you’ll have to do whatever I say.”

“He already has to do whatever we say,” says the Princess of Ida, mildly.

Her sister sniffs.

“I think we should skin him anyway. The Hollow Boy doesn’t _talk_ , just his skin does, and we could stitch his mouth shut so it’d be quiet while his body walks around.”

He’s been their cavalier for six months. 

“I’m a Prince,” he mutters “You’re not allowed. You can’t.”

“Can so,” says the Princess of Ida.

“ _You_ can’t,” Nabrius snaps, “ _She_ would do it, and pretend it was you, because _you_ can’t do _anything_!"

He is seven, tiny chest heaving with fury, six months a cavalier and all they’ve done is take his sword and his skin and ignore him.

Like he’s not even important enough to hide from.

He is twenty-five, and the Princess of Ida lunges and shoves her knee down into his throat until he chokes, larynx breaking with an ugly _crunch_ , hissing, “Take it back. Liar. Take it _back_!”

Either way, that’s not what their bedroom looked like. Not really.

VI.

Naberius Tern dreams of teeth. He dreams of secrets. He dreams that the Princess of Ida rips a tooth from her mouth, the chipped one, and the tooth is not a tooth, it’s a sword, a cavalier’s rapier with a diamond blade, and he dreams that she runs him down through the snow like a hound on the scent. Runs him through with the blade. Smiles.

He dreams that the Princess of Ida turns to the Princess of Ida, wearing wolf fur and blood, and neither one of them will even deign to sniff his corpse.

He dreams of a mouth like a military graveyard swallowing him whole, and the secrets with it, and not having to deal with any of it anymore, if they would only finish him off this time, but they never do.

VI.

Naberius Tern wakes in Canaan House.

In the dark, his skin is smooth and perfect. Unblemished. Unmarked.

He rakes a hand through his sweat-damp hair, lips pressed to the inside of his arm, and scans, only a little a blearily, for the noise that woke him.

The Princess of Ida whimpers in her sleep, head tossing against her pillow, lips twitching back over her teeth.

Naberius Tern crosses the room without a sound, and settles on the foot on her bed, weight pushed into one hip. 

“Easy, doll. Easy,” he whispers, skimming the backs of his knuckles down her jaw.

She takes his arm by the wrist, still asleep, and presses the back of his hand to her mouth, worrying at the skin with a soft, slurred murmur, incoherent with exhaustion.

She bites down.

One of his elegant, eggshell-blue veins pops like a grape between her teeth.

“That’s it, doll. Easy does. We’ll go home soon, and you’ll be lyctors, and won’t the others just _gag_? Easy now. We’ll get it sorted, doll. You and me.”

The Princess of Ida is sleeping, and the Princess of Ida is sleeping, and one of them looks disappointed, and the other one just looks bored.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on tumblr @thefaustaesthetic or twitter @gin_n_chthonic


End file.
